The Thursday letters page thinks first person shooters will stay out of fashion, as one reader is unimpressed by The Callisto Protocol.
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Infinite and beyond
I am not at all surprised to find that no one is playing Halo Infinite on PC, as I know it is increasingly hard to find anyone that cares on Xbox as well. There’s no point going over what went wrong as it was clearly all 343’s fault and if Microsoft is doing anything about them it’s not obvious to me. They’re out of their league and have been given chance after chance, so it’s obvious to me they should be taken off the game and… beyond that I don’t know.
All I do know is I don’t want to see 343 working on any more games and I am not interested in a Halo Infinite 2 (they’ve kind of backed themselves into a corner with that name!). The only choice seems to be to reboot the whole franchise and start again from scratch, with a new developer.
The obvious choice would be a developer made just for Halo but a) that’s what 343 was and b) Microsoft hasn’t got the patience for that and the years it would take to set up. So yeah, I think they’ll get in someone from Activision to do it. I bet they would’ve paid Bungie a pretty penny to do it too, if they hadn’t been bought by Sony. But that boat has clearly sailed.
Cornish
The long game
It always amazes me what faith the more unhinged members of fandom place in petitions, as if the UN are going to turn up at Microsoft’s door demanding Starfield on PlayStation 5 because a couple of thousand fans demanded it.
We all have a huge influence on company’s decision making, in terms of whether we do or do not buy their products. If you don’t like a game, then don’t buy it and if enough people agree with you then they won’t make anything else like that.
It is harder for exclusives, which obviously you can’t buy anyway, but don’t buy an Xbox and Microsoft will eventually get the message, albeit more slowly. I’m willing to bet Starfield will eventually be on PlayStation, even if it takes five or 10 years.
Wotan
No more updates
I have to ask, do we really need remasters of Red Dead Redemption and GTA 4? It’s not the PlayStation 2 era where HD updates made a remake and as far as I’m concerned the original Xbox 360 versions still look fine for both games via backwards compatibility. I guess 4K and 60fps would look better but it’s not going to make that much difference and it seems a big waste of time and money for both the company and us poor saps paying for it.
If they added some extra DLC style content to it that might be different but that also seems an awful lot of effort for something that’s probably not going to move the needle for most people.
Maybe Rockstar is big enough that it won’t affect them at all but I’d much rather we have no more remasters and GTA 6 came out a couple of months earlier. And that’s without even mentioning the mess that was GTA: The Trilogy.
RaptorKing
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Good-looking failure
I picked up The Callisto Protocol recently for cheap, as while I knew it didn’t review well I didn’t think it was meant to be terrible and I liked Dead Space. Well… it is terrible. Or at least the worst good-looking game I have played for a long time.
The whole thing just feels like an Xbox 360 game but with modern graphics, and yet only in all of the negative ways. It’s extremely repetitive, with no variety and bad level design; the gameplay is very limited in scope (focused, some might say) and everything is very shallow, with not enough to do. Crawling through vents and awkward punching is all there is.
There’s barely any story, I don’t like any of the characters, and the monsters aren’t very interesting or well designed. I’m kind of shocked that it could be so meh. I don’t even know if I’ll get around to finishing it.
Wyrmwood
Well good
I spotted this fantastic Zelda themed well dressing while visiting the village of Hope in the Peak District at the weekend.
Well dressing is a village tradition in rural areas such as the Peak District, in which the artwork is intricately crafted onto a wooden frame using petals, leaves, and moss.
Adrian W
GC: That is really nice. Kudos to whoever did that.
Incomplete information
I would just like to give a quick message to object to the reasons recently quoted by the reader Treston in a recent Inbox, regarding Final fantasy 16.
He hasn’t taken all factors in mind and has instead jumped to a conclusion that isn’t quite right.
Case in point: Final Fantasy 16’s launch sales in the UK were down 74% on what Final Fantasy 15 managed back in 2016 – a figure that sparked much speculation over the PlayStation 5 title’s commercial appeal. However, it’s now being reported that over 56% of Final Fantasy 16’s UK sales were digital, made through the PlayStation Store. In other words, we only got (less than) half the story via last week’s charts.
For some reason physical copy sales of the game were quoted first. Instead of 56% of digital only sales. They were for some reason omitted from the final tally but added later. This would indicate that Treston’s comments are unequivocally false based on his ‘Physical Copy’ sale only assumption.
G1jfanclub/Peter J Rees
GC: The weekly UK charts never includes digital sales for any titles, so physical sales are all that were being discussed. Digital sales figures only become available later and 56% is actually quite low for a percentage of game sales, which is as you’d expect for a mainstream single-player game.
Change of name
I’m sure EA Sports FC will turn out to be just as successful as FIFA ever was and it will ultimately prove to be a good idea on EA’s part. Maybe sales will be a bit lower the first few years, as people are slow to realise the name change, but that’s all it really is.
It’s not even a question of laziness, they’ll want to make it as similar as possible so that people get that it really is still FIFA but called something different. I don’t see this as either a good or bad thing.
Mike Strong
Old fashioned person
A reader commented the other week about how there weren’t really many new first person shooters anymore and it really is amazing how much that genre has fallen out of fashion. I think there are various reasons but it occurs to me that one of the main ones is that for online shooters people like to buy cosmetic items and it’s a lot harder to make them seem worthwhile in first person gamers.
Call Of Duty is kind of its own thing, which doesn’t have very wacky skins anyway, but I wonder if part of the reason for Overwatch 2’s declining success is because it’s first person and that seems old-fashioned now to a lot of people.
I’m sure there are a lot of other factors but I think people just expect to see their character a lot more nowadays, whether it’s one they’ve customised or a licensed character in a single-player game. First person games will always have their place but it may be a long time before they swing back into fashion, or perhaps they’ll just continue to decline and eventually be overtaken by VR games in general.
Vorpalwing
Inbox also-rans
This Pokémon forums business is hilarious, what is up with people? If you started playing Pokémon when it started, even as a kid, you’d be relatively old now and I guess they’re getting to that stage where they want it to be ‘darker, more mature.’
Lentil
I wish I was retired so I had enough time to play Starfield. It’d probably be the only way I could get enough spare time to make a proper job of it.
Suede7
This week’s Hot Topic
Since we’re now over the halfway point of the year this weekend’s Inbox asks what is your favourite new game so far?
You can name any game on any system, but it has to be something that was released new in the UK this year. 2023 has already seen many greats, including Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom, Street Fighter 6, Humanity, Resident Evil 4, Amnesia: The Bunker, Diablo 4, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Hi-Fi Rush, and many more.
How does your pick compare to some of your existing favourites and what do you think of the year as a whole so far, and its potential for the rest of the year?
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The small print
New Inbox updates appear every weekday morning, with special Hot Topic Inboxes at the weekend. Readers’ letters are used on merit and may be edited for length and content.
You can also submit your own 500 to 600-word Reader’s Feature at any time via email or our Submit Stuff page, which if used will be shown in the next available weekend slot.
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